What did Huffpost do with my Article?

This past Friday, my article “Meet the New Soviets: Gingrich, Walker, Breitbart”, was yanked from the Huffington Post after being up for 8 hours.  (My article is still not up, but you can read it here.) The reasons it was pulled are troubling to me and should be a concern to anyone who wonders about the future editorial directions of Huffington Post.

As a bit of background, I’m a national security policy wonk from out West who has settled in DC.  I’ve enjoyed a great relationship with the Huffington Post–where I have blogged on national security and politics for 4 years.

My post came down during the recent fracas over blogger Andrew Breitbart being demoted from the front page because of his anti-social habits (mostly lying and name-calling). Breitbart–a right wing darling–is a friend of Arianna Huffington and played a leading role in Huffpost’s founding. To their credit, an editor did call me and let me know my piece had been yanked.  Yet for three days, people who linked to it saw my headshot with a note saying the article didn’t meet editorial standards.  Ouch.

Feeling wronged, I called on Sunday to clarify the policy and request that they put the post back up.  I spoke to one of the blog editors. Following the discussion I came away with serious concerns over who is driving editorial policy at the Huffington Post.

When I asked for specific reasons why my post had been removed, the editor seemed flustered. I sympathized with the chaos they must be experiencing given the site’s rapid evolution and purchase by AOL.  He told me that it was because I compared three public figures to Soviets–which he described as a totalitarian regime (like Nazis or Fascists).  What?!  My Soviet-era comparisons in the article were about destroying public trust and the propaganda required to sustain such destruction.  I wasn’t comparing any of the public figures to people who had committed Soviet atrocities, (read the article for yourself here.)   I stand by what I said because I saw this government-propaganda hybrid in action, having actually worked under that regime in 1989.

My first thought  about the reason for the article removal was based on the Millennial dominance in online industries. Maybe I needed to talk to someone older. The editor explained that he was senior enough, it was about my comparison and that this wasn’t blowback due to the demotion of Andrew Breitbart from the front page of Huffington Post last week.

However it looks like nobody told Andrew Breitbart that.  Here’s the tweet-sheet:

Breitbart’s tweet within two hours of my posting:

Find the inappropriate ad hominems about me, Newt Gingrich & Scott Walker in this fresh @HuffingtonPost piece:http://huff.to/hf9ivc andrewbreitbart Highly Influential 3 days ago

And here’s what Breitbart’s loyal sidekick Lee Stranahan–who quit blogging for Huffpost over Breitbart’s demotion tweeted a short time later:

stranahan: HuffPost censors @loreleikelly Meet the New Soviets: Gingrich, Walker, Breitbart REMOVEDhttp://huff.to/dFINfQ ; is she banned from page 1?3 days ago retweet

And I’m not the only one who finds the timing odd. This tweet from Tim Karr of Free Press:

Did the Huffington Post pull this article (http://huff.to/fTyMRs) because @AndrewBreitbart tweeted this (http://bit.ly/eIYcnT) ?8:40 AM Mar 25th via bitly

And then there’s this one from Breitbart himself that mentions AOL:

Did Arianna really create arbitrary AOL content rule kicking me off @huffingtonpost front for telling truth about ‘dumb twat’ @vanjones68? March 26

Page 1 of 2 | Next page